Thursday, April 15, 2010

ADHIMRS

Here's a question: what do ASYNDETA, NEWEL, and MIDRASH have in common?
Answer: nothing! Absolutely nothing!

Well, except that these are a few words which have caught my eye in the past month or so. The reason being that I stumbled across them more than once in that period of time, which I think is unusual. The first one I noticed was missed by two livejournal users that I follow (in their annotated games); the second was used in two different paperbacks I read (Lee Child and Stephen King), and the third has a slightly longer anecdote to go along with it:

A friend of ours asked me a few weeks ago if I had ever heard of 'Nachshon', a character who is said to have been the first to enter the Red Sea when it was parted back in the Old Testament days.
Let me step back for a minute- I consider myself a 'recovering evangelical'- we moved out to western mass 5 years ago to start a church (among other reasons) and since then my views on the American version of christianity have changed quite radically. I used to be pretty politically conservative and have swung mostly in the other direction in that respect, too. So now I don't go to church or really read the bible or any of that stuff. Maybe just a product of my new liberal western mass environment. But anyways, for some reason people still see me as a bible-reading type of guy (even when I don't mention any of my background to them.)
I told her I had never heard of him, and it turns out that he is only mentioned in the MIDRASH (an early Jewish interpretation of a biblical text), which is why I never heard of him. And then today I was playing scrabble on my cellphone and the computer played MIDRASH/ S(QUIRE), and I said, 'It's a sign from God!' Just kidding.

of note: plural is MIDRASHIM, MIDRASHOT or MIDRASHOTH, and the anagram is DIRHAMS, a monetary unit (pl.) of Morocco.


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